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So after weather and date, for our daily opener, I ask the kids ¿qué hiciste ayer? (what did you do yesterday?), and sometimes they talk about dates and romance. I encourage them to lie heh heh, and sometimes they do, and sometimes we actually hear about their real lives. Because it was impossible for me to remember who was with who, I started writing down their “dates” on the homework board and they started bringing them up on subsequent days.

So now we do telenovelas every day and the stories are great:

Shyla was at the mall with a male friend when her new boyfriend SAW THEM OMG so now he is not texting her.

Manpal– the total music-geek hipster– is dating his ukelele.

Nihaal was with a girl who is 18″ tall

Sharky’s GF is short, ugly and smelly, but since physical appearance doesn’t matter to him he is happy.

Hafsa’s ex is now dating her twin sister Hajjar…but Hafsa’s new guy (although not as good-looking as the old one) is nicer, smarter and funnier.

Every day, we add a sentence or two to each of the various dramas. Amazing how much the kids remember and it’s a riot playing around with this endless deployment of mini-stories.

You get to mix a whole lot of grammar together, and you get a lot of buy-in, cos the kids are basically inventing everything. The quieter ones just have to show comprehension.

The trick– as always in C.I.– is to get a load of interesting miles out of very little vocab. One noun and one verb (or other word) per day is loads. So lately we have been focusing on dejó a ___ (s/he dumped ___) and engaño a ___ (s/he cheated on ___). Great soap opera material. The only problem is getting 1st and 2nd person reps but that’s what imaginary text convos are for. Here, Abby dumps Abdul:

Here, Nihaal’s new girlfriend, la rapera Soulja Fraud, has a blood feud with rapero Quavo. So Nihaal threatens to not road trip (to UtAH) with S.F.

What should language teachers teach? And how should teachers prepare students for “hard” tests like say the French or Spanish A.P. exam?

Some say “task-based” stuff, where you learn vocab, necessary grammar and verbs etc to get a specific job done. This seems pretty obvious: if I’m going to France, I am going to need to order food, so we had better do a unit on food, restaurants, ordering, money etc.

Some (including me) suggest teaching starting with the most-used words in a language (which by definition includes unsheltered grammar from the beginning).

A few dinosaurs suggest grammar rules.

I’ll be controversial here and say that “real world” prep and teaching “useful” vocabulary etc is not what we should be doing. If we want to prepare students for the “real” world and teach them “useful” vocab etc, we should avoid “preparation” and “usefulness.” I agree with Nicole Naditz’ idea…but for very different reasons. Why?

First, as Bill VanPatten noted in one of the earlier episodes of his podcast, we don’t prepare people for specific “real-world” situations. Rather, we teach them to cope. Since we can’t anticipate what will happen after/outside class, and even if we could there’s way too much necessary vocab to be learned to deal with possible situations, and since single unknown words can throw us off our carefully-practiced restaurant (or whatever) interactions, what we should be doing is giving people as much understanding and as many tools as possible to get language work done.

Here is a standard student response to a typical “communicative” task: practice using restaurant and food vocabulary in a “realistic” situation. Of course, the kids wrote a script. They are learning the vocab, and naturally have not yet acquired it, and so they write it down to try to remember (“quick can we do our oral test before we forget?” they say). The usual problems with “communicative” tasks apply here: junky output becomes junky input for other learners, it’s what Bill VanPatten calls “language-like behaviour,” as opposed to language, most of the time “preparing” it was probably spent giggling in English about the humour of two gangsters arguing over pizza, etc.

The biggest problem, though, is its usefulness. When the kids “perform” this for their teacher, one misremembered line will throw the whole thing off. And if either of them ever gets to France, what happens if the server doesn’t say commander? What if s/he says qu’est-ce que vous voulez? This– in context– won’t matter that much. It’s pretty obvious that the server is asking what you want.

The real question here is, was this activity acquisition-building? Since it’s output-focused, full of junky language, rehearsed etc, the answer is no. The best tools, in language as in carpentry, are those that are simple and versatile. In terms of bang-for-buck this is super low-value. If we spent two periods creating, rehearsing and then “performing” these dialogues, that’s 120 minutes where the kids could have been reading/listening to input. If you were dead set on teaching them food vocab, you could have done Movietalk or Picturetalk about restaurants, or done a story. But the acquisitive value of output is very limited.

This is where high-frequency vocab comes in. Starting with what Terry Waltz has called the “super seven” verbs– to have, be, be located, want, need, go, like and want– and using high-frequency vocab, we give learners the “flexible basics” for “real world” situations. You might not know the French for “I would like to buy a train ticket for Lyons,” but if you can use high-frequency vocab at the ticket booth– “I want to go to Lyons”– you’ll be fine. (train, ticket and to buy are relatively low-frequency words).

Terry Waltz made a similar argument recently. She asked us to imagine buying copper wire and pliers (low-frequency vocabulary) in a foreign country. Now, what is more important? Knowing how to say “do you have?” or knowing the words for “copper wire” and “pliers”? If you can say “do you have…?” (a very high-frequency expression), it is relatively easy to point, gesture, use a dictionary etc to learn the words for “copper wire” and “pliers.”

Second, most “real world” (i.e. situation-specific) vocab is almost always available in context. You think you need to know forty Spanish words for food? No you don’t– when in Colombia or Spain, look at the menu! Can’t say “towel” in Hindi? If you know mujhee jaruurat hai (“I want to buy…”), youcan point at a towel, and the kaparwallah will beam, tell you what the word is and also maybe offer you chai. Don’t know how to say “buy” and “ticket” and “first class” in French? Go to the train station and if you can say j’aimerais aller à Lyons, you’ll be fine. You’ll learn…and in all of these cases, because the words are associated with movement, other speakers, images, sights, sounds etc, there’s a good chance you’ll remember their meanings and eventually just spit them out.

Third, we have the problem of, basically, who cares about future “payoffs”? Most of our students won’t end up in China or Mexico or wherever. Should we assume that sufficient motivation for them is the possibility that one day they will be chatting up French or Chinese people? That– like grammar teaching– will work for one student in twenty.

What is going to movitate the other 19? We know from psychology that the three main motivators to do well (in anything) are autonomy, mastery and group belonging. The highest-paying job in the world blows if you’re robotically following orders. The living definition of stress is lack of mastery (or at least being good at something) while being obliged to do it, and people will go to incredible lengths to be a part of (and defend) a community. I suspect that this is why online games such as Call of Duty are so massively popular: you can re-do levels until you get them, you can do “ops” in groups, and you have a fair amount of control over who you are (avatar building) and what you do.

What about the A.P. exam? Teacher David W. on the FB group recently asked this:

“at what point/level (if any) do you or other TPRS teachers stop striving for 100% comprehensibility? I’m tied to the Advanced Placement Spanish Exam as an end goal, and it draws heavily on authentic print and audio sources. It’s more or less impossible for non-heritage speakers to have 100% comprehension of these by their fifth year taking Spanish classes. So at some point it seems like they have to start getting used to doing their best despite not getting everything (which they’ll also face when interacting with non-teacher native speakers). Would love to hear any thoughts on this.”

Great question. Here’s what I think (thanks Terry Waltz for many discussions on this):

Language comes in two kinds: what we understand, and what we don’t. The more we understand, the easier it is to figure out the rest. Look at these two Blablabian sentences:John florfly Miami 24 Nov.John florfly squits Miami 24 Nov.

The first, well, it probably means “John goes to/is in/went to/was in Miami on the 24 Nov.” The second…well…there are waaaaaay more possibilities. So, how do we make the second sentence easiest for the Blablabian 101 student to figure out? Well, we have two options:

a. we can get them to “practise” various “metacognitive strategies” or whatever edubabble currently stands in for “guess.”
b. we can teach them as many words as possible.

Now, if the students know that florfly means “went to,” they will have an easier time guessing at what squits means.

Bill VanPatten has talked about this problem and has noted that “constraints on working memory” have a significant effect on processing. Basically, having “too much stuff in the head” at once slows processing. So, the more high-frequency vocab students have “wired in” to the point where they automatically process it, the more “mental bandwidth” they have for dealing with unknown stuff.

It’s like organising your cycling or climbing gear, or books, or clothes, in a room or in a closet. All the Googling, planning and ideas won’t help if you don’t have racks or shelves. C.I. of high-frequency vocab is the shelving system of language: it makes life easier by providing slots to stash things as they come in.

There is no research (of which I am aware) suggesting that “processing noise” or getting incomprehensible input helps acquisition. Indeed, one of the reasons why babies need 4,000-5,000 hours of input to generate even single words (while a student in a C.I. class can start generating simple sentences within a few hours of starting C.I.) is that most of what babies hear is incomprehensible. A little kid literally hears this when Mom talks to him: bla bla bla candy bla bla bla tomorrow.

Many people who travel get a lot of incomprehensible input even when they know the language where they are traveling. When I am in a Mexican market, I would say that 90% of what I overhear– slang, fast Spanish, low-freq vocab– is over my head, and I’m pretty fly (for a white guy) at Spanish.

There is no way to speed up processing speed. As American audiologist Ray Hull notes, adolescents process L1 at a max of about 140-150 word per minute, while adults typically speak in L1 at about 180 WPM. In L2, Hull suggests that 125-130 WPM is optimal speed, and that nothing can speed up processing speed. Asking an adolescent to “practise” understanding adult L2 speech is like telling a short kid to grow– it’s a developmental thing that cannot be changed.

I would suggest that if you have A.P., you have three strategies which are your best friends:

Reading. Blaine ray and others have noted that by Level 5, students should be reading 1,000 words a night. If the reading is 95-98% comprehensible, the kids will slowly acquire new words. This will help on the A.P.

Movies and video. Watching anything in the TL, with L1 subtitles, will help. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s good L1, accurate L2, and it’s compelling.

Online language apps– e.g. Duolingo, or LingQ– are (to me) boring, but a lot of kids like them. If they are reading/listening and understanding, they are acquiring.

Anyway, there we go: “useful” vocab is useless, and “real world” language is not really effective processing practise.

This is a bail-out move when stories fall flat, or it’s the day before a test and you don’t have another video to Movietalk, and you are out of readings. I think the idea originally came from Ben Slavic’s dictation suggestion. I just thought, why not have them read and write instead of listening and writing?

I have a basic “script” version of each story. It is the skeleton of what I ask. Last year, I found that I was unable to keep the stories 100% comprehensible during asking, unless I circled everything sooooo muuuuch that the stories got boring. (This year, I am better: using multiple characters = waaaaay more reps). So, one day when the kids and I were equally grumpy, I went to the photocopy room, made 30 copies of the basic script of the story, and got the kids to translate. Surprisingly, the kids were quite happy to sit and work quietly. My guess is that this is because a C.I. class has a lot of listening and talking, and reading & writing is a break from this.

The next day, when we did extended embedded readings, the kids seemed a lot more focused and I realised that the extra repetition– read and translate– had upped comprehension. So this has become a regular move.

It’s very simple, it gives the teacher a break, it lets the kids slow down with reading, and it’s easy to mark.

a) Hand out a printed version of the story. You want 100% comprehensibility.

b) Get the kids to copy the story out in the target language. They should leave TWO blank lines under each line of the story.

c) Under the T.L. writing– in different-coloured pen– have them translate into L1.

d) Under the L1 translation, leave a blank line. This is to keep things looking neat.

e) Keep going, and remember to indent paragraphs and dialogue, etc.

For marking, I’m a big believer in random sampling. Pick three sentences at random, and see how accurate the translation is. The kids get a mark out of three. I am fairly strict with meaning on these, because they have vocab sheets and we have been through asked story and retells, and I am in the room where they can ask for help, etc. I can mark a class set of these in under five minutes.

I usually give them 40 min with a story. 75% of kids can get it done in class; for the rest, it’s homework. While this sounds boring, the kids are fine with it, I know I am getting them to really read, and it’s low-tech. My inner rebel also likes it: zero tech, no prep, non-“communicative,” super-high levels of comprehensible input, older than old-school, etc. Above all, it works.

My colleague Rome Lacvrencic, head of the B.C. Association of Teachers of Modern Languages, and I had an interesting Twitter discussion recently.

Lavrencic, of Polish extraction, heard some Polish at home in Ontario, Canada, English everywhere, and was in late French Immersion. By the end of Grade 12, he says he was “more proficient in L3 than L1.” He attributes this to being able to speak more French than Polish.

This is a familiar refrain: “I used to be good at ____ but now I don’t speak it much so I’m bad at it.”

This was where I disagreed. I told him that speaking wasn’t the point, but that listening was.

So I thought I’d take a look at this via numbers and my own experiences.

My L1 was German. I heard it at home a lot until Grade One, and much less after Grade Four, when my cousin Sig came to live with us. Sig spoke Spanish, French and English, so English it was at home.

Now, when I speak German, I sound like a five-year-old from 1963. I hear my folks speak German but that’s about my only exposure. And I suck at German. When I am around German speakers, I understand a ton but I can say much less than I understand.

In terms of input, mine dropped to close to zero at age 9. Lavrencic went through a roughly similar process: Polish dropped off but French input massively upped. My guess is that he (and anyone else in his shoes) would get 5-6 hours daily of French input at school, plus homework (reading) while in Polish (like me in German) would have gotten maybe an hour or two.

Lavrencic took French in Uni and also teaches it so he’s obviously super-proficient.

In my view, Lavrencic is bringing up the problem of post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this), also known as the correlation vs causation problem. There was speaking and input, then there was acquisition. The acquisition happened after both the speaking and input. Was it therefore because of the speaking?

The research says it’s the input. Terry Waltz recently remarked, echoing Krashen, that there are loads of cases of people acquiring languages without speaking them. The deaf who do not get speech training are one. As we all know, when we start acquiring a language, we go through Krashen’s “silent period” where we understand more and more but our speaking lags. It is also well-known that babies as young as a few days have begun understanding some aspects of language 8 months prior to even single words emerging.

Recently on Yahoo this topic came up and master teacher Hai Yun Lu weighed in. She’s Chinese, married an American, and wants her kid to acquire Chinese. Check it:

“I have raised my son to be bilingual. There are many rules and practices we have implemented at home in order for this to happen. After my son was born, a college professor visited me and shared research she had read. If I wanted to raise a bilingual child, then his second language input needed to be minimal 30% of his total language input (I wish I could find this actual research to share with everyone).

Let’s say, if his waking/alert time is 14 hours a day. 8-9 hours in daycare = English input. He has about 5 hours at home with us. Listening to me speaking Chinese to him, his father speaking English with him and his parents conversing in English. Of course, on the weekends/holidays, he gets more Chinese input. Still, we can barely meet the minimal input amount. Therefore, rules have come into place in our house. Each time we go back to visit China, first and most, we carry a suitcase full children books back for him. (Richard Scary’s collections, Curious Gorge, Clifford…) I only read to him in Chinese, even with an English book [she means, she reads the words to herself silently in English but says them in Chinese].

We rarely turn on TV before he goes to bed. If he’s interested in watching some cartoons, I do whatever I can to get them in Chinese. Therefore, he watches his favorite cartoons in Chinese (e.g Thomas and Friends, Disney films, Curious Gorge, Magic Flute’s Adventure). The majority of his playmates have been Chinese-speaking kids until this spring. He has developed close friendships in JK, where we have finally “extended” our friends circle.

My son is one of the very few kids who can speak Chinese fluently, in comparison to the kids in a similar situation. Many people complain to me that their kids understand their languages, but only speak back in English. I always say “input” proceeds “output”. They need more comprehensible input before they can output. (Here I have left out some psychological factors such as the desire to “fit in”, which typically occurs once when kids start school and they start to refuse to speak their parents’ languages.)

Many of my son’s friends’ parents are very eager to have their children to speak Chinese, and they keep saying to me: “just speak Chinese to my child, I hope we will be able to speak.” It hasn’t worked for any of his friends yet, because what we can say to each other is incomprehensible to his friends, unless I want to turn a playdate into a Chinese lesson time.”

What is “personalisation”? We all agree it matters. My definition: personalisation is any connection between subject matter and individuals’ interests and characteristics.

A very talented District colleague recently did me the favour of Twarguing with me. She posted a picture of a bicycle with some Spanish sentences explaining the value of riding a bike, thus:

For the non-Spanish-speakers, the sentences include “puts a big smile on your face” and “reduces the risks of heart attack,” etc. These are all about the advantages of riding a bicycle regularly. I would never use this with kids, cos like O.M.G. it’s boring, LULZ but anyway.

When I saw this, I looked at a few words from the picture Wiktionary’s Spanish frequency lists. Most of that picture is low-frequency vocabulary (i.e. not in the top 1500 most-used Spanish words). So, I responded with the following question:

Shauna here is suggesting that students investigate their own interests and use language pertaining thereto. In other areas, we have suggestions about using project based learning and genius hour in the language classroom (with excellent rebuttals (especially for genius hour proposals) from Sarah E. Cottrell).

We are here getting into a classic traditional-methods-vs-comprehensible-input teachers’ argument: do we make language class interesting– and personalised– for students by

a) recycling high-frequency vocabulary, or

b) by allowing students to choose their own vocabulary for activities?

A general note: while we all take some interest in what others do/like etc, there are limits. Walk into a Joshua Tree fire circle, and if you’re not a rock-climber, you’ll be baffled and bored within minutes, because “it’s slammer left-facing hands on 2s to a sidepull and then a mantle over a crappy blue Alien and a slab runout” is basically irrelevant to you. In any social situation, there is a balancing act between interest in others’ stuff and being bored. So it is in a classroom.

Textbook personalisation suggestions have a number of basic problems, one of which is keeping kids interested. Why should Johnny want to listen to/read the vocab about ordering dinner, or recycling, or bargaining for fruit in a French market, over and over? It’s not that these activities and words are boring per se, but when was the last time you spent three weeks using forty words and one grammar device to discuss the same topic? Never– because that’s boring. So the simple answer– for teachers who do not use stories– is, let the kids pick and choose their vocab. T.P.R.S. and A.I.M. teachers, as we shall see, don’t have many challenges keeping kids interested.

But if students choose their own vocab for class activities or projects, there are five big problems.

First, there is the problem of usable frequency. If we want to build functional fluency in any language, our first priority is make sure students acquire the most-used words before the less-used. Obviously, there will be exceptions: “communicative” teachers typically like to make sure kids know all the words for school things such as pencil, desk etc, while we comprehensible input people like animals etc for our stories. Now, a student may be into activities that use high-frequency words. But much more often, the opposite is the case.

If Johnny is into, say, bicycle racing, and Sheila likes wrestling, great. But how often is Johnny going to hear/read cycling-related– and Sheila wrestling-related– words? The answer: in most language communities, especially ones to which people in their first five years of language acquisition belong, not very often. This means they are putting effort into something which has limited communicative value for them and for others in their class.

Second, we have the problem of shared interest. As I noted above, if Baninder likes Call of Duty and Maricela likes chess, what– as relative beginners– are they going to talk about? Maricela is probably not going to be especially interested in hearing about shooting people, team missions, ammunition etc, and Baninder is not going to want to hear about endgame strategies and Sicilian openings, etc.

In the “real” world (probably online), Baninder can find his own C.o.D. crew in French and Maricela can play chess with French speakers, but in class– where realistically 95% of language acquisition happens for our students– how are we going to get each kid– not to mention the rest of the class– to “buy into” hearing and reading others’ specialist vocab?

(As an English teacher, my first great reading realisation years ago came from my brilliant colleague Louise Hazemi, who in Surrey pioneered the use of literature circles for novel reading. We used to have a “novel a year” system, where kids were assigned To Kill A Mockingbird in 10th grade, Lord of the Flies in 11th, etc. The problem? Most kids hated these books (either because they were “too hard,” or simply because they had been assigned), didn’t read them, cheated on tests and essays, etc. So, at our school, we asked the kids what books they would like (and asked teachers) and for each grade bought 10 copies of 8 novels. Now, the kids in each grade pick a novel to read (yes; we still offer Mockingbird and L.o.t.F.) and BOOM! all the kids read at least one novel, and all the kids report enjoying their reading (they still do essays, discussions etc about their chosen novel).

It is much the same with silent reading. I start each English and Social Justice class with 20 minutes of silent reading. There are three silent reading rules:

You must read a book (no newspapers or magazines) and not talk, listen to music, or use your phone.

You must not read anything from any class during silent reading.

Your book must not suck. If it does, get another one.

How does it work? Brilliantly. While my less-literate boys grumble at the start of the year, after a week every kid reads and every kid likes reading. Probably two-thirds of kids read young adult novels, while another third prefer things like biographies, how-to books, various factual genres, self-help, etc. This is because they choose things that are interesting (and readable) to them and because there is no “accountability piece.” No “book report” marks, reading logs, etc. As long as they are reading and enjoying their reading, I am happy.

Now at this point I can see Madame Nero (and any other person who shares her view about how to personalise the language class) saying “Exactly! Let language kids do the same thing! Let them decide!” However, the key here is that nobody is forcing the kids to learn/acquire things which they are not interested in. Kids like free reading because it’s free: they aren’t forced into something they don’t care about.)

Third, there is the quantity of input problem. We know that what people acquire is a function of how much comprehensible input they get. They need to hear the words or structures a lot to first recognise them automatically, and even more to be able to automatically say them. So if we are going to run our class around student-identified student interests, how do we deliver 30 different sets of vocab often enough that the kids– even if they want to, which we are not guaranteed– pick them up?

Say each kid gets to decide 5 words germane to their interests which they want to have incorporated into class activities. That’s 150 words. That’s half of a year’s recommended vocab load right there! As we very well know, it’s simple math: the greater a variety of vocab we use, the less time we have on each word which means poorer acquisition of each word. As the great Terry Waltz recently noted, if you want the kids to acquire more words, teach fewer words. There is also the challenge of integrating specialist vocabulary into teacher-planned activity.

Fourth, we have the output problem. In many traditional classes, it is assumed– wrongly– that if kids “learn” vocab (and grammar) and present it in some way, they are picking it up. This is simply wrong, as the research shows. And, learners by definition generate error-filled and impoverished (two-dimensional) output. I do not see the point of making other learners listen to that. As Terry Waltz has famously said– with Stephen Krashen agreeing– “peer to peer communication is the McDonalds of language teaching.”

This is what is supposed to happen in a “communicative classroom (here, two Vietnamese speakers are learning English):

Thanh: Where Michael today? He here?

Vien: Where is Michael today? He is not here.

Thanh: Ahh, yes, where is Michael today? He is not here.

Here, Vien– who is also learning English– is supposed to notice Thanh’s error, “remodel it” properly, so Thanh can fix his output. Now, here is what would actually happen:

Thanh: Where Michael today? He here?

Vien: Michael home. He not here.

Thanh: Ah, yes, Michael home.

Even though Vien and Thanh want to learn English, and are working away at it, they will inevitably produce poor output (for a variety of reasons). So the ideal situation described above generally does not happen with two learners. If Thanh’s interlocutor was a native (or very competent) English speaker, this communicative activity would probably work.

Fifth, there is the dictionary/Internet problem. As soon as the kids want to generate their own vocab, we know what they do: they fire it into Google translate, and we know the results. So it becomes the teacher’s job to edit word lists, activities, presentations, rehearsed dialogues, etc. I don’t know about you, but that’s boring and often I am myself scrambling to figure out how to say _____ in Spanish.

So, if our goal is to deliver a ton of compelling and multidimensional high-frequency language, and to repeat that language over and over so students hear it often enough that it gets wired in, the “choose your own topic” idea won’t work. But the question remains, how do we personalise vocabulary and maintain student interest?

One answer involves using the world’s oldest and most-proven teaching method; stories.Everybody likes a story, because we naturally find people and their hopes, problems etc more interesting than things or ideas, and because suspense– what happens to ____?— is another universal hook. Stories are always more interesting than any other kind of input. Everyone can relate to basic human questions such as wanting to have ___, being scared of ____, liking/disliking someone, etc.

In T.P.R.S., our use of parallel characters and parallel problems allows us tremendous room for personalisation. If we’re working on esperaba que ____ le explicara… (“s/he hoped that _____ would explain…”), say, I can have a boy who wants to have the mysteries of talking to girls explained to him (great topic for all teens: boys want info, girls will think it’s hilarious) and a girl who wants to have say Call of Duty explained to her. (Stereotypes are great to play around with). This works even better when we know students, and we can throw a kid (and their interests, from say our start-of-year questionnaire) into a story. If we know Breleigh likes dogs, hates cats and looooves Ashton Kutcher, well, Breleigh eseperaba que Ashton Kutcher le explicara por qué no le gustaban los gatos. Any half-decent storyteller can get the audience to empathise with or at least be interested in a character who is a bit different than they are.

Another answer involves recycling high-frequency vocabulary in a way that ackowledges student interests and preferences. For a rank beginner, something like owning a specific kind of pet, or liking or disliking any kind of thing or activity is a great start. In my first story, Los Gatos Azules, a boy wants to own ten blue cats. So, we personalise by asking the students the same questions we ask our actors:

Me: Clase, levanta las manos si te gustan los gatos. (half of class raises hands, so I point at a kid who didn’t). Mandeep, ¿te gustan los gatos? Mandeep, do you like cats?

Mandeep: No.

Me: What did I just ask you?

Mandeep: Do you like cats?

Me: Mandeep, los gatos– ¿Son simpáticos, o no son simpáticos? Cats– are they nice, or not nice?

Mandeep: No.

Me: ¿Los gatos no son simpáticos? Cats aren’t nice?

Mandeep: No.

Me: Class, what did Mandeep just say?

Class: Cats aren’t nice.

So, here we have some personalisation: the kids are explaining their opinion about cats and dogs. This is basic stuff. (Note: I am not expecting any output other than y/n here (though if the students want to say more, they can). My only aims are that they understand what is being said and that they can connect the vocab to their selves or interests.

Here is a level 2 example of personalisation. In the story we are doing, a Dad is chewing his kids out for not having done homework and chores. So we are acquiring what did you do? and I prefered, etc. In the story, Dad asks his kid “What did you do last night?” and she says “I went to Cabo San Lucas and talked for 9 hours with Dave Franco.” Dad asks “Did you do your homework?” and she says “No, I didn’t, Dave did it.”

All we have to do in P.Q.A.– personalised questions and answers– is ask kids in class the same questions we ask our actors.

Me: Breleigh, ¿que hiciste anoche? What did you do last night?

Breleigh: No hice nada porque tenía que estudiar. I didn’t do anything cos I had to study

M: ¿Qué estudiaste anoche? What did you study last night?

B: Estudié la biología. I studied bio.

M: ¿Qué querías hacer anoche: estudiar, o bailar? What did you want to do last night: study, or dance?

B: Quería bailar. I wanted to dance.

M: John, ¿qué prefieres hacer tú– bailar, o jugar Call of Duty? What do you prefer to do: dance, or play C.o.D.?

We can get an immense amount of mileage out of a fairly limited range of vocab, as you can see. If we throw in some weird stuff, we can get a zillion more miles. For example, I could ask Breleigh if she likes elephants (free cognate) more than cats. If she says yes, we’re off: do you own an elephant? what is a good name for an elephant? etc etc. These details can serve in stories, and they are great for random “review” P.Q.A.

Now, these are simple examples, and I hope you’re seeing the point: we can personalise without getting into specialist vocab. Not every kid is into Call of Duty (or chess, or ballet, or gangster rap, or Peruvian food, or French culture), but a teacher who is willing to listen to kids will figure out what people have opinions about and get them to express those.

The teacher’s job in part is to explore student interests, but also to make the language classroom functional (comprehensible and interesting) for everyone, so sometimes you have to say “sorry, Johnny, that’s too complicated” or “nobody else is interested in that, sorry.”

Personalisation: people basically want their interests and selves acknowledged. If Johnny says “I prefer C.o.D. to ballet” and Suzy “God, I hate cats,” that is good personalisation. We acknowledge their interests and views, and we give them what they need: an ocean of repetition on limited vocab, varied by context, cognates and sometimes wacky fun stuff.

connect students with high-frequency vocab by soliciting their opinions, or info about them

use stories and ask students the same questions as you ask actors

integrate students– or info about their real (or imagined) selves– into stories

NOTE: Teachers in an immersion environment are going to be able to use more vocab than the rest of us, and there is therefore going to be more finely-tuned personalisation, and at serior Immersion levels there will be way more room for vocab personalisation. But for most of us…keep it simple is the way to go.

I’m posting this to show that– as long as you keep the language 100% comprehensible– you can easily operate with two levels at once. You can see that the 2s and I are providing input for the 1s and there is no real output pressure. I check for understanding, I provide a chance for y/n and/or one-word answers, and I let the kids say as much or as little as they want.

Also note what we are doing re: grammar. The beginners can easily operate in 3 verb tenses. Traditionally you would see pretérito (passé composé) in level 2 and imperfecto (imparfait) in level 3. Now, a lot of the beginners won’t be able to say everything, but after awhile it will kick in. As Susan Gross points out, if the input has everything we need from Day 1, and it’s comprehensible, kids will pick it up when they have heard it a ton and are ready for it.

The main rule: if it is said or read,nit must be 100% comprehensible. I also do a lot of gesturing for verbs, nouns and past tense. Here is what we did for a bit today.